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Lobstermen’s Association Helps Members Navigate Healthcare Law

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is serving as an official navigator to help its members shop for and enroll in the new health insurance marketplace.

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is serving as an official navigator to help its members shop for and enroll in the new health insurance marketplace.

We wanted to be a part of this to help Maine lobstermen understand the new health law and the new requirements.

December marks the beginning of the end of high lobster fishing season in Maine.  A time when many of the state’s roughly 5,800 lobstermen will haul in their gear and begin to dive into the new healthcare law, Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, told the Bangor Daily News.

As independent business owners, lobstermen are responsible for their own health insurance, and with the complexities of enrolling in the new Health Insurance Marketplace under the Affordable Care Act, MLA, in partnership with Fishing Partnership Support Services (FPSS), is serving as a navigator to help lobstermen throughout the state shop and enroll in the new system.

“We wanted to be a part of this to help Maine lobstermen understand the new health law and the new requirements—to make sure that they have all the information they need about what’s available for options for health coverage so they can make the best informed decision for what they need,” said April Gilmore, MLA’s certified navigator.

Gilmore, who completed the federal navigator training, has been traveling to different areas of the state since mid-October, right after open enrollment began, delivering workshops and sitting down with lobstermen and their families in their homes, libraries, wherever they can find a space to help them enroll.

“We are trying to cover the entire state, the entire coast, so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” she said. “We’ll do a presentation on what the marketplace is and how to enroll, and explain the subsidies and the penalties so they can better understand the Affordable Care Act in the insurance marketplace.”

MLA also provides information and links to resources on its website.

The organization MLA is collaborating with, FPSS, is part of the Fishing Partnership—a nonprofit dedicated to supporting fishing families in New England and one of the more than 100 organizations that were recently awarded federal grant money from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve as navigators.

Among the awardees were several associations, including the Arizona Association of Community Health Centers, the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved, and the Pennsylvania Mental Health Consumers’ Association.

Gilmore said associations such as MLA are important resources to help Americans navigate the new healthcare law because of their existing communications with members. For example, MLA has been publishing information on the ACA in its monthly member newsletter since July.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Katie Bascuas

By Katie Bascuas

Katie Bascuas is associate editor of Associations Now. MORE

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